they turned to the desolute wastelands of war
by mother moon
Summary: 'Kira doesn't really care much for the 11th Division, but then very few in Siereitei did.' On hiatus.


It was a day of little reprieve.

The sun – so glorious, so obnoxious against a blue so clear - was a high and blindingly white nucleus of heat. Greedy hot rays coiled their fingers into yellowing grass; worked their way into the parched, rough bark of trees and curved their tips lightly over the bleached stone that made up Seireitei. The few clouds that crawled lethargically across the sky upon their grey bellies were thick and pregnant with a rain long overdue. Their white pillars descended in a slow crescendo from the hot sky; staggering with its intensity, unforgiving, desperate with a thirstfor the first few drops of light rain. It was a heat, a passionate embrace during the last days of an endless summer, felt even within the dark safety of indoors to which so many had retreated.

A weary exhale escaped through Kira's teeth as he discarded the finished report in front of him neatly onto a pile to his left; simultaneously reaching for another from the somewhat larger pile to his right. It was a day that ought to be idled away under the shade of a large elm, as something icy slid down the throat to quench its dryness, without the need to think about much. The little breeze there was remained delicate –drifting idly through open windows, playfully catching the edges of curtains, lifting the ends upwards. Like a lover bringing the back of a hand up for a kiss. The curled corners of the reports, that crowded the already too small polished desk of the 3rd Divisions lieutenant, rippled. When the breeze dropped, which it did at sudden and frequent intervals, there was a stiffening to the air so that it became stagnant_. _Difficult to breathe.

Kira could feel the humid cling of his mandatory black, silk uniform suctioned tightly against the woven breaks in the seat of his chair.Sweat collected in the pooling of hollows – the pits, the collarbones, the backs of thighs. It was as never-ending as the day's heat, several times Kira had to raise a hot and heavy hand to catch the droplets with his sticky, smooth fingertips before they spilled; smudging the damp ink of the report he was working through beneath his chest.He paused to accommodate a welcomed stretch. Pushing the top half of his body forward as he brought his arms backwards then straight up – feeling that satisfying twist of muscle as several clicks ran up from the bones in his shoulders to the ends of his wrists. Kira's chest heaved with another exhale of air, a motion which brought his tired shoulders up high before dropping them down. Dead weights. He stared, fixated, at the movement of muscle under his swollen, red knuckles as he clenched and unclenched his left fist. Trying to encourage some feeling into the back of his hand which had seized in warm pain, tingling along the underside of the skin_. _Leaning back in his chair, Kira contemplated the towers of reports that kept him penned to the office on such a day.

And just past them, the blue sky.

A smooth sashay of polished oak against polished oak with fingers bending around a lithe wooden frame fell upon his ears as his office door slid opened. Kira looked up, narrowing his eyes in an attempt to see past the rows of paper stacks at who had entered. It wasn't until one or two had been carelessly pushed aside by big, rough hands that the wide smile on Ichimaru Gin's long face materialized.

'Whatcha up to Izuru?'

_Izuru_.

There were few who called Kira by his first name. These were usually good friends within informal environments. Often with the flow of drinks and laughter, when the walls of reserve had once again faded away with sake spilt on the granule of the bar and the faint breath of alcohol lingering in the air. But Gin used it always. As though it wasn't so much the intimacy he enjoyed but more so the sensation of the sound as it rolled forwards from the back of his wet throat towards the pointed tip of his tongue. Kira carefully and politely sat up a little straighter folding his hands, neatly expectant, in front of him upon the desk.

'Just catching up on a few documents that have been backlogged since January last year sir.'

Gins' grin widened a little as a part of Kira curled itself into a vague if familiar tangle of nerves and guilt.

Through the small slit of his office door – left carelessly ajar upon his captain's entrance, blanched with the brightness of the sun as it led into the maze of Seireitei – a moth had stumbled. Kira watched it begin to make a hesitant, clumsy path around his desk. Pausing upon the few small spaces left to tremble along the staggered piles of paperwork before tenuous flight.

He wondered whether he had intended to sound so impatient.

'Ah yeah?'

Gin's tone was mild. Kira could hear the rasp of nails against skin as his captain gave the flushed, raised flesh on his neck an indulgent scratch.

'That back when I had my other lieutenant yeah?'

The moth tumbled away on its brittle wings, thudding in a brief moment of fretfulness into the smooth plane of the window. It made several attempts. Kira could hear the soft futile thumps as its body, powdered and lenient to the touch, collided into glass then trickled on.

'Ahhh,'Gin suddenly, happily, pushed off the largest stack that had been temporarily perched onto the chair opposite Kira and cast himself into it with a creak of wood and a puff of air 'I remember what a pain she was. Always goin' on an' on an' on about that paperwork. Not like you Izuru.'

This last part was said with such an affectedappreciation that any initial despondency Kira may have felt as he watched the stack topple – a despairing crisp mass sent skittering - was smothered by the customary bloom beneath his ribcage. Unfurling upwards, past his lungs and throat until Kira was enveloped within a warm affection for his captain. He looked away, his cheeks inflamed with a pleased embarrassment, chewing down a half-smile that had begun to extend from one corner of his lips unbidden.

'Is there something I can do for you sir?' Kira asked reaching for a cloth from the draw in his desk and giving his hands a surreptitious scrub.

The question was part decorum, part distraction. Kira was in no doubt Gin that was about to send him on a needless errand he had somehow, himself, created. A recent habit of Gin's was to 'borrow' particular items from other captains of Gotei 13 for an indefinite amount of time. Whether Gin had any actual use or reason for these items or whether it was merely an attempt to determine which captains he could get a rise out of Kira remained, as of yet, uncertain. Dropping the cloth, dampened from clammy sweat that had set evenly across his palm, Kira looked up to see Gin give a lazy roll of his upper body. A motion which caused the collarbones in his neck and shoulders to stand out in their extraordinarily vivid manner upon his bony figure. Completely absent minded in its gesture.

Kira slipped his chin into the mould of his fingers_. _

He remembered the uncomfortable shift in Renji's shoulders, after their first encounter with Gin. And the way his friend had narrowed his eyes against the sun as they watched Gin slink around the corner into dusks shadow. His silhouette followed by the Renji's deep mutter.

'Creepy.'

Though they took care never to voice their discontent to Kira, he knew his friends Renji and Hinmori held an intense dislike for his captain. And Kira, for his own part, felt he understood why. For it was true, Gin was strange. In both appearance and manner. He was tall. Not necessarily the tallest amongst the captains, nor indeed Seireitei, but he was long and thin with an established artistry for towering. To hold another's gaze, Gin had to tilt his small head - nestled beneath that startlingly white hair, perched on a neck, too elongated, which sloped into shoulders, too broad. His face still retained the even velvet of the young as he stretched his mouth wide into his diminutive, languorous eyes. It was as though he was laughing at you from a great height – though whether benign or malign, Kira never could tell. From the neck downwards Gin's body continued in its collision of muscle and ligament_. _They coiled themselves into the thick forearms and strong legs even as they slid themselves into the narrowed bend of joints, wrists and ankles.Wired tight and ready for an unpredictable strike. His hands extended themselves into lean bones which opened up into a wide span. And despite the unusual amount of pride he took in his clothes - neatly pressed, falling delicate into their folds -in Gin's gracefully awkward essence they acquired an element of shabby.

Kira was losing the blood from the bone high in his cheek and the ball in his palm.

'Nothing too serious. Just a small favour I need doing. You can take time out from all this can't you?'

Gin's voice tugged Kira back to his office. He caught the waft of cooling sweat as Gin crooked the steep of his fingers towards his chest; dislodging the moth as it came to rest anxiously upon the hairs of his large dismissive hand_. _The stacks that encircled them rustled their pages like the whispering walls of a miniature fortress.

'Of course sir.'

Truthfully, Kira wanted to avoid spending as little time away from the reports as he could. They just kept accumulating. Furthermore, he had foolishly arranged to meet Renji for a drink this evening whilst they had lunch together and the sweet promises of sake had been all too tempting. But the words had come automatically.

'Cheers Izuru. Kurotsuchi asked me to give this to Kenpachi. Well,' Gin reached into a fold in his captains' haori, pulling a face but still managing to remain full of good humour ', he didn't ask exactly. Just I kinda felt for the little guys supposeda deliver it you know? For such new recruits to step inta 11th...specially on a day like this. Don't worry. I promised I'd tell that crazy scientist nothin'.'

Kira fingers paused as he reached for the eye patch and Gin gave a short quiet laugh.

'Apparently the ol' cap of the 11th asked for something with a little more bite to it.'

Centred in the black strip a wide cotton mouth gaped. The keen point of a white enamelled grin framed the thick heaving flesh of a purple tongue as it drooled over a fat lower lip.

'Know what it is Izuru?'

Gin bent his torso forward – an action which caused his sharp elbows to give the stacks a dangerous nudge - across the desk so that his face hovered inches from Kira's own. His expression glistened as the sun fell hotly across his nose and coloured his cheeks with a graze of light pink. Kira hesitated.

'It...it devours reiatsu doesn't it?'

The eye patch was deposited into Kira's open palm.

'Atta boy Izuru.'

The wind stirred the light, free hairs above Gin's crown as he fell heavily against the back of his chair, using the corner of a large sleeve to wipe away the beads that slicked his fringe to his forehead. Outside Kira's office door the stillness was broken by the crackling raspof wind through leaves and the hot slap of sandals upon cooked stone. He focused upon the eye patch resting in his palm. With the tip of his thumb he gingerly traced the deep groove outlining the lower lip, watching as the sharp teeth churned with a hungry grind. As he did so, he felt the tickling itch of something small, the downy fluff of a moth's feet perhaps, quivering cautiously along the sharp curve of his jaw. Gently, he brushed it away from his skin with the placid flick of his fingers.

'That's exactly what it does. Nuts huh?'

Kira knew little of the 11th divisions captain, Zaraki Kenpachi. The little he did know - disturbing and possibly flawed in reliability – was devised from a mix of fact and idletalk_. _Often murmured into his ear as he watched the large form of Zaraki slope past, predatory even in his gait_. _Kira understood that the 11th prided themselves on being the strongest and that, by their logic, this made Zaraki the strongest of all Gotei 13's captains. He knew that Zaraki had fulfilled one of three requirements needed in order to become a captain of Seireitei's 13 Divisions. It was, after all, common knowledge that Zaraki had defeated the previous captain of the 11th in one on one combat; something which was considered, predominately by Captain Kuchiki, as distastefully barbaric_. _A detail heightened by the fact that it had begun as a dispute over the rightful ownership of a name. He had heard it had been brutal to watch, ending in the other's death. Kira had not been there to see Zaraki raise his head to heavens as the skies parted, lamenting coldly onto sodden earth below_. _Nor had he witnessed the howling laugh that had emitted from Zaraki's great throat and thick belly, past his split lips. He had not seen this wild ragged man stoop to pick up the previous captains tattered haori, drenched in blood, to sling over his shoulders. But he had listened to others when they told him that it had been an act so natural_. _As though acquiring the role of Kenpachi was as simple as the feat of stealing a dead man's garment, and came to Zaraki as breathing came to others.And Kira also knew, despite Zaraki's abysmal spiritual awareness, his reiatsu was more than formidable. Therefore, what Kira failed now to comprehend was why a captain of such frightening strength would desire to be handicapped in such a manner.

'Well Kenpachi's always been a bit nuts if you ask me.'

Gin touched the soft part of his temple nimbly with his index finger.

'You can give it to him right?'

'Of course sir.'

Kira slipped the eye patch within a pleat inside the thin lining of his kosode –useful for securing small items discreetly –feeling the intense prickle of engrossed eyes tracing the shell of his petite ears. He glanced up, almost shyly, towards his captain as the sun slunk behind the thick plume of a passing cloud. The office plunged into shadow, ensnaring within the sharp indentations of Gin's features - the deep recesses of those sunken cheekbones and between his obscurely neat eyebrows, folded into a crease as he became entangled within his thoughts. His languid gaze was not trained upon Kira, however, but just above and left of his lieutenant's shoulder. In thegathering darkness, silence collected, the breeze amplified and Kirashivered. The wind now cooled verged upon cold_._ Its hushed breath scattering a few more papers which had rested upon Kira's desk fluttering across the floor; the acute mix of paper against wood and dust stirred.As the silence extended with an accumulated weight, Kira became aware that words hovered somewhere in between. Waiting and wanting to be spoken aloud but penned in by thin lips on either side.

'And will that be all sir?'

Gin's attention remained above Kira's shoulder, who wondered whether his captain could hear him or if his mind had wandered too far off. It wouldn't have been the first time. Gin could waste whole days in Kira's office simply lost to his own thoughts. He decided to wait patiently. Allowing the tips of his left hand to brush against the furrows in the bamboo of his brush pen. Should Gin drift he would work through several more reports before heading to the 11th barracks. He watched carefully as his captain's eyes – which were grey and sad when you could see them – seemed to hardened a little, his sharp chin sinking into his chest to rest amidst his thin, brooding shoulders.

'The 11th are a funny lot, don't you think?'

The words, with their unspoken, loitering desire, the sudden expectation they seemed to demand; caught Kira off guard. His hand automatically snatched itself back, away from the potential of work, and his mouth opened– unsure and slightly panicked if he ought to reply.

'Sure, they're a real funny lot alright, let me tell you Izuru.'

Gin shook his head speaking to Kira's short fingers, entwined politely once more, as though absorbed by them as they picked at the skin around a blunt thumb_. _Kira could hear the swipe of Gin's hair - short, dry and feathery to the touch –against the grain of the chair.

'It's a scary thing don't you think? They way they are,' Gin's words came out slowly. The tip of his red tongue feeling around for them, searching for something lost within the dark, moist cavern of his mouth ', taking a pride and joy in something so dark, so twisted .'

Gin lifted his head to capture Kira's startled blue eyes with his own. His voice softened.

'They're so funny it hurts sometimes.'

The grin slipped and the smile, usually so wide, became a mere hint at the corners of his mouth as candid words tripped from the length of his tongue.

'An' war's a sad, sad thing Izuru. I don't think it ought to be celebrated the way they do. Do you?'

In depths of Gin's seriousness the chilled gloom, tinted blue by the daylight, gave him a rarely noticed weariness. Yes, Kira understood well why it was Hinamori and Renji could despise his captain so easily; coldly casting their quick, at times cruel, judgements. Essentially, the very root of their dislike was born from fear. Physically he intimidated them, his looming height, his immense strength, that weird and wonderful body. Emotionally he aroused their mistrust. His words insinuated. His fingers were clever, creeping and sly. Which had led them to believe what really lay behind Gin's falsely bright smile was something purely sinister – a strength which would turn. Sinking its teeth deep into the hand of Seireitei which had fed it for so long. To leave; laughing all the while, entrails of carnage in its slithering wake.

But Kira knew otherwise.

In moments like these, when alone with his lieutenant, in no danger of being disturbed; the mask of facade would lift and, no matter how brief, reveal a glimpse of vulnerability. Precious moments of honesty. Something that Kira treasured.

The sun escaped from behind the cloud. The office swamped with light once more, chasing away sadness and fatigue. Gin's short rounded teeth grimaced between his lips as he stretched his smile wide again, sad thoughts forgotten.

'I could easily deliver the thing myself you know? It really ain't too much of an effort for me.'

'I know.' Kira replied soothingly.

The laugh Gin then gave was soft, genuine and tickled with a playful glint glimmering within the deep pitch of his eye as he lunged across the table again, toppling the majority of papers to his right. Before Kira had even time to give a pained wince, Gin's thumb had snagged roughly at the corner behind his ear. Dragging down to the hollow of his throat where it remained, rubbing the pad in a circular motion. Kira gripped the arms of his chair, the cold shock of surprise flooding the pit of his stomach and washing over his skin. The hand withdrew.

'Ah dear Izuru. Look at you. You're such a mess. Ink all over yourself.'

The skin on Gin's knuckles was worn, red and rough. Gin laughed again, but this time it was loud and big bellied– as it always was when Kira, bewildered and flustered, began stuttering apologises for reasons he wasn't entirely certain of.

'No need for that Izuru. You never need to apologise to me.'

With a chafing scrape Gin's chair was pushed back as he cheerfully stood and headed for the door. The papers underneath his feet lost their whitely crisped edges; forming dirt trodden crumpled pleats, blemishing quickly beneath indelicate touch and offhand treatment. Gin slid the door open wider, those quick fingers tapping a steady rhythm against the wooden frame as he cast a sympathetic look in the direction of Kira's shoulder with a slight nod of the head.

'Poor thing never really did have much chance did it?'

Kira followed his gaze in time to see a spider, sharp pincers engorged in preparation, its body swollen and speckled; descend lethargically upon the moth as it struggled against the invisible cords that had ensnared it. In the time he looked back towards the door Gin had gone. Kira collapsed backwards, sinking low into his seat so that the arms rose to greet his shoulders. Another gust –a sincere sigh – lifted from his mouth as he cast his eyes dejectedlyover the paperwork, no longer confined to their tidy stacks, littering his office floor. He looked up and watched the spider slowly enfold the moth neatly into its silken cloth and made a decision. He would leave reports for today. Without bothering to pick them up from the floor or even to pause to pack away the ink stone, ink and brush pen back into their tidy cubby hole, Kira stood; stretching once more to allow his muscles and joints to acclimatize movement and made his way to the door. Outside, heat wrapped itself around his body and he had to use a raised arm to obscure the sun's rays whilst he blinked back his vision. Each time his eyes closed, the back of his lids blazed with the fiery reds and yellows of a hot day. He allowed them to remain shut as he took a deep breath, just as the breeze rose in tempo, and caught that slightly cooling scent of summer – water, sand and salt floated into his mind. He loitered in that moment; a seizure of memories lurching around the corners of his brain, until the breeze dropped again and remaining in the sun became unbearable.

Moments later Kira had turned and begun to make his way towards the 11th Division barracks_. _


End file.
